The people and projects inside the BBC's vast R&D lab

Musical MoodsAs part of the BBC's initiative to find new ways of
classifying decades of programmes within the digital archive, the
R&D team launched Musical Moods. This was a
sound experiment that was headed up by BBC research engineerSam Daviesalongwith acoustics
expert Professor Trevor Cox and coincided with National Science and
Engineering Week in April this year. Users visit
a website and specify their age, gender and current move. They are
then played a series of some of 144 different theme tunes and asked
to gauge how they rate on scales of playful/serious,
masculine/feminine, happy/sad and relaxing/powerful. They are also
asked what TV genre they think it is and whether they have heard it
before. The aim was to find out if familiarity with a programme
affects your emotive connection to the music and, furthermore,
create a new recommendation classification system based on the way
you perceive the mood of the programme.

SnippetsSince 2007, the BBC has been creating its own comprehensive
digital store of everything that has been broadcast. The result is
Redux -- a "few petabytes" of data stored in the R&D
department at the BBC and drawn upon like an internal iPlayer for
production and research staff. It includes subtitle data and is
linked to InFax, the BBC's Programme Catalogue built up of
manually-entered data from cataloguers whose job it is to watch the
shows and document the places, people and scenes features. Andrew
McParland, Audience Experience, is using Redux as an API to build
more user friendly applications. One such application is Snippets,
which allows users to search for particular people or things within
all of the programming. It searches subtitle data line by line to
find mentions and then brings up the precise scene or snippet where
it is uttered. Currently it is used for production teams looking
for archive data, but in the future it could be used to allow
members of the public or schools to search for particular TV
references. The team has even trialled a Google alerts-style system
where you could specify a particular place or person you are
interested in and be sent a link to programmes where those terms
are mentioned.

Surround VideoWe are all familiar with the idea of surround sound, but Surround Video is a way of enhancing the viewing of TV on a
normal display. It requires using a wide angle or fisheye camera
alongside the normal camera when filming a programme. Then the
image from the fisheye camera is projected onto the walls of the
living room while the show is on TV. This gives the impression that
the action within the show creeps out across the walls of your
living room, filling your field of vision. When a character moves
out of the main shot (i.e. what appears on the TV screen) you can
see them skulking off down the side of your room. The projected
image is dimmer and lower resolution than the main image but helps
to give a strong feeling of immersion. The technology is currently
being tested by the Production Labs unit (Alia Sheikh and Peter
Mills) to see whether it is a system that could be realistically
and practically used by production teams.

Production Magic
Graham Thoms, a principle research engineer at BBC R&D, has
been leading a team looking at ways to enhance content with
innovative graphics. One of the first developments was the Piero
system. This is used in sports coverage to create a virtual stadium
that is synchronised to "real" coming from TV cameras. By knowing
where the actual camera is and the angle it is at and by mapping
this to the simple grid of sports pitches, it is possible to create
a virtual 3D environment through which virtual cameras can pan and
tilt. It is useful for analysing particular moves in football or
rugby in real time, letting viewers see the play from angles that
weren't captured by cameras -- so lots of swooping aerial shots
without the need for expensive aerial cameras, for example. The
technology was commercialised by Red Bee Media and went is
used in programmes such as Match of the Day.

The team is now working on using similar technology to be
able to analyse two athletes of sports people side by side. It
allows production teams to create superimposed side-by-side
comparisons of, say, skiers doing the same jump. It is hoped that a
the technology might also be used at Wimbledon this year to provide
graphics to swoop between the different areas of the grounds and
into live tennis matches.

Leading to the 2012 Olympics, the team is working on analysis of biomechanics
that would allow for graphics that compare performances of things
like stride length, centre of gravity or angle of jump. This would
help visualise subtleties of athletic technique that would aid
commentators' explanations.

You can see a number of the technologies mentioned above in
our gallery, below...